The menu is the first and the last impression of your restaurant. Apart from beautiful infrastructure and amazing ambience, all that customers remember is the delicious food and what the restaurant served them. It’s the responsibility of a restaurant owner to look after his restaurant menu. One of the most important things to keep in mind is the items you put on your menu will be responsible for bringing in the revenue that it takes to run the business. A restaurant’s menu needs to be designed very intelligently as it reflects what your restaurant is about while showcasing your top dishes.

Most of the restaurants do major mistakes while designing their restaurant menu. Some of the most common restaurant menu mistakes are a poor categorization of the food, cluttered look, lack of attention to the detailing, emphasizing more on the prices than the food, and most importantly not having an online food menu. A fabulously looking menu may have a lot of scope for errors that many restaurateurs may overlook.

Here are a few ways you will need to think about while creating or updating your menu.

Design of your Menu – The design of your menu should reflect your restaurant. Designing your menu if conveying what your brand is. Keep in mind that your colour, theme, fonts and font sizes should be consistent throughout the menu. While designing your menu it’s very important to distribute each section equally. Every corner and section should be given equal importance. There shouldn’t be any errors in the menu.

Categorizing the Food – While categorizing your menu keep in mind the things you want to draw the attention of your customers. You can categorize the menu cuisine-wise, consumption wise or by preferences. Your categorization shouldn’t cause a confusion for customers. Categorize in a way that it doesn’t look poor in terms of content and image placements.

Appealing Food Images – Taking Food images is extremely challenging and if executed poorly, can do more harm than good. If you are including photos of your food anywhere on the layout, they must be taken by a professional photographer and actually make the food appear appetizing. Factually including a nice-looking picture alongside a food item increases sales by 30 percent.

Prices and currency placement – Most of the restaurant owners go in a deep thought to include the prices on the sidebar of the menu or below. Mr Dave Pavesic from the Restaurant Resource Group explains by leaving currency symbols off your menu, you’ll be allowing the customers to forget (if only for a minute!) that they’re spending money – and in turn, spend more. Another important consideration is where to place the actual price. If prices appear in a column running along the side of the menu, customers may be inclined to compare items based solely on price and choose the cheapest item.

Promote what’s most profitable – Keeping a few signature dishes on the top of the menu may attract and change customers preferences. Advertise your discounts and offers on the top of the menu for the users to see it first.

Get Feedback – Effective feedback, both positive and negative, is very helpful. Feedback is valuable information that will be used to make important and needed changes in the menu. Sometimes your friends and co-workers would help if you would miss out on including anything. Getting feedbacks can actually improve a lot of things in the menu.

To run a successful restaurant business requires constant attention to food, customers, and everything that revolves around the restaurant. And the menu ties it all together. That’s the only reason menu is so important, and you have to make sure your menu is at the top of its game. How do you want your guests to feel when they walk into your restaurant? As they take their first bite? And when they leave the restaurant with a good experience!

Designing a menu can be a great challenge and a lot of fun. Try to work in a happy and creative team. Keep your minds open to a lot of ideas and rooted to your major restaurant objectives. The most important factors to consider with menu design are readability and the appetizing nature of visuals.

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